Author: andy

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A month of weddings…

This month is getting pretty busy, lemme tell ya… Last weekend, Brooke and I went up to Lincoln, IL for Alex Pham’s wedding. I was “drafted” to play my djembe for a song (“You and Me,” by Lifehouse), so we had to go up on Friday for the rehearsal and then, of course, stay for the wedding and reception. All in all, a good trip, and we certainly got to see lots of people, many of which I figured I’d never see again after undergrad. On the way back, we dropped by the new Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, IL, which was pretty neat. It was just opened last year (I think?) and features a few different theaters and plenty of documents, including original copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the marriage license between him and Mary Todd. Anyway, it was an interesting trip and you all should drop by if you happen to be in mid-Illinois…

Otherwise, we’ve got Mirnela’s wedding next weekend (co-worker here at the lab…) in Mountain Home, AR and Adam Waudby’s wedding on June 23rd in St. Paul, MN. For Mirnela’s, we’ll just drive down for that day and stay a night, but for Adam’s, we’re going to head up that Wednesday and camp in Wisconsin for a few days before heading into Minnesota…a sort of “vacation,” if you will… While I look forward to the trip, the 12 hr drive there (and 12 hrs back…) aren’t all that appealing…

So yeah, July will be a welcome change from all the driving we’re doing this month… Although, I think we’ve got a few more weddings popping up in August, both of which will be here in St. Louis… Too many people getting married, I tell ya…

Oh, and I turn 25 on June 20th. Send cash. 😉

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Summer Viewing List

…not to be confused with a “summer reading list,” ’cause that’s so 1992… I don’t really read, that is, so movies will have to do, and more specifically, trilogies. Thus, I’m going to do my best to watch all the trilogies I own this summer. The goal, of course, is to watch each trilogy in one day as best as possible. This may be difficult for some of them, but I’m sure going to try…

So let the list begin:

    Star Wars
    The Matrix
    Back To The Future
    Indiana Jones
    Pirates of the Caribbean
    X-Men
    Spider-Man
    The Terminator
    Ocean’s 11/12/13
    Lord of the Rings

I watched the Star Wars original trilogy this past Saturday whilst playing games with Josh, and I’ve got 2/3 of Pirates watched (…need to re-watch the first one again…) – Spider-man is also getting spread out, in that I need to re-watch 1 and 2, after seeing 3 in theaters a few weeks ago. I’ll try to watch all ten Star Trek movies as well, but those are more difficult to fit into one day, so I’ll have to spread that set out over the entire summer.

Of the nine trilogies listed above, Lord of the Rings will be the most difficult (extended edition, of course!). I mean, Nathan, Jerry and I watched all three in one day back in Undergrad… That’s a good 12 hrs straight, of course… I guess I’m saying that I’ve done it once, so I’m unsure as to whether I need to do it again…but I probably will, anyway…

Obviously, I need to be spending more time in the lab… 😛

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Review: POTC – At World's End

So, if you’re read any reviews for “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” you’ve seen that they’re somewhat mixed, and honestly, I think I agree.

While the acting and effects were just as good as either of the previous iterations, the story was all over the place, to the point that I really didn’t know what was going on for half the movie…and when a movie is nearly 3 hours long, that “half the movie” quickly becomes 1.5 hrs. I don’t like being that confused for so long… As other reviewers have stated, much of this confusion comes from the fact that you don’t really know who’s on whose side until the very end of the movie…and even then, it isn’t completely clear… Then again, the double/triple-agents amongst each side are to be expected, as we are dealing with a movie about pirates…

But then again, there were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and at least some of the charm of the original made it through the second movie and into the third. I think the trouble for me comes in deciding whether this movie was better than the second one or not. Many were disappointed by the ending in the second movie, especially after following a mostly stand-alone first movie (and in my review of “Dead Man’s Chest,” I correctly compared this series to what was done with “The Matrix”…), and I can’t say that this third movie leaves me feeling all that much better. In all honesty, I still wasn’t completely satisfied with the ending of this one – but if you want some peace in your life, wait until after the credits for one additional, and useful, scene…

So, did I generally enjoy the movie? Yeah, I guess… Will I buy it when it comes out on DVD to complete my collection? Absolutely… But was it better than “Spider-Man 3?” Nope…

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Review: POTC – At World’s End

So, if you’re read any reviews for “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” you’ve seen that they’re somewhat mixed, and honestly, I think I agree.

While the acting and effects were just as good as either of the previous iterations, the story was all over the place, to the point that I really didn’t know what was going on for half the movie…and when a movie is nearly 3 hours long, that “half the movie” quickly becomes 1.5 hrs. I don’t like being that confused for so long… As other reviewers have stated, much of this confusion comes from the fact that you don’t really know who’s on whose side until the very end of the movie…and even then, it isn’t completely clear… Then again, the double/triple-agents amongst each side are to be expected, as we are dealing with a movie about pirates…

But then again, there were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and at least some of the charm of the original made it through the second movie and into the third. I think the trouble for me comes in deciding whether this movie was better than the second one or not. Many were disappointed by the ending in the second movie, especially after following a mostly stand-alone first movie (and in my review of “Dead Man’s Chest,” I correctly compared this series to what was done with “The Matrix”…), and I can’t say that this third movie leaves me feeling all that much better. In all honesty, I still wasn’t completely satisfied with the ending of this one – but if you want some peace in your life, wait until after the credits for one additional, and useful, scene…

So, did I generally enjoy the movie? Yeah, I guess… Will I buy it when it comes out on DVD to complete my collection? Absolutely… But was it better than “Spider-Man 3?” Nope…

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Strange days…

“Times, they are a changin’,” says Bob Dylan… Not that things are drastically different right now from where they were a month ago, but school has certainly shifted to a different “chapter,” so to speak… As of a few weeks ago, I have no classes to attend anymore in graduate school, so I’m working completely on research now. Really, I’ve just been spending the last two weeks getting in to all the literature on the subject(s) I’m investigating, getting papers from the last few years and as far back as 1948…

I guess it’s just that it’s going to be weird getting used to not being spoon-fed information anymore. It’s not like I can go to a textbook for this stuff, or go to a few lectures on a general subject and take an exam after you learn the material… Nope, now it’s reading directly from the fringes of all scientific knowledge, sifting through hundreds of papers and data to try and decide what information to focus on, and what to set aside… It’s just a different kind of learning, a kind that I’m not terribly used to…yet… Kinda like solving a puzzle, really, in that you run across various pieces that you have to fit together. If they fit, you win a Ph.D… 😛

Anyway, life is good, otherwise. We’ve got three weddings to attend in June (let alone our own anniversary…), and we’ll probably spend a little vacation time up in Minnesota while we go to one of them, but that mostly takes care of the weddings for the summer. We’ve gotta figure out what to do with Edie for a few of those weddings, but I’m sure there are plenty of people that’d be willing to watch her (hint, hint…).

Onward, summer!

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Turtle vs Cat

Don’t believe me? Well…

For those of us with cats, it’s pretty damned hilarious… Makes me wanna get a video camera and find a turtle for Sam to play with…

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Of Generation Gaps and Twitter…

So, before yesterday, I’d never heard of Twitter…I had to learn about it from an NPR podcast I listened to… It’s apparently a new social networking phenomenon (a la Facebook or MySpace…) that tells the world what you’re doing at any given time. You can post, IM or use a cell phone with text messaging to post a short blurb giving everyone an update, and then you can subscribe to these updates by various means… For example, I could subscribe to your Twitter account and anytime you’d update it, my cell phone would vibrate and I’d receive a text message letting me know what’s up. You can write any message you want, from “looking at websites” to “eating a ham sandwich”…

According to the Wikipedia article, Twitter has been around since October of 2006… NPR and the New York Times, amongst others, have done articles about it… Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world use it, apparently…and this leads me to my point:

Why did it take until May for me to hear about it?

I guess it means I’ve reached something of a turning point… Up until now, I’ve kept up with technology and websites relatively well – Truman students knew about Facebook before it was even available for them to join, and well before news organizations jumped on it as a “phenomenon”… And I keep up with geeky things like that pretty regularly looking at sites like Slashdot and Engadget… So do we all eventually reach a point when our knowledge of the world becomes antiquated? You hear stories from parents beginning with “when I was your age…” all the time, and at some point, all of our parents probably realized that they were knowing less and less about the generation(s) that were coming after them… My generation is just barely involved in the whole “social networking” thing, but the high school students at church are all over MySpace – I simply have no interest in it. Back in college, I’d hear about stuff from friends in classes and new sites to visit, but we don’t really talk about such things in grad school…I’d assume that “real world jobs” would be similar…

I guess I just wasn’t planning on hitting this realization just before turning 25… I figured it’d happen after I had kids, and after they got a bit older and started getting into their own interests… I wasn’t thinking that I’d reach a point where I can visually see the generation just behind mine gradually distancing itself from mine…if only in this one sector of our lives…

I’m sure I’m just over-reacting, but with the world moving faster and faster and more information becoming available over the internet, it makes you wonder if the number of years between each generational shift is decreasing… For example, I’ve never thought that my sister and I (separated by 3 years) were in different generations, but maybe we are…

Has anyone else heard of or used Twitter, or is it just me?

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Review: Spider-Man 3

So, as of right now, “Spider-Man 3” is ranking something like 62% at Rotten Tomatoes, indicating that the feelings of critics are somewhat mixed…largely, they’re comparing the third iteration of the franchise to “Spider-Man 2,” a movie that garners 93% at the same site.

After seeing the movie myself, I can understand some of the criticisms. Yes, there are a lot of characters and a lot of villains, and these don’t have the depth that the characters did in the previous two films. Yes, it is a little long, clocking in at around 2.5 hrs. And yes, the overall moral and point of the story can get somewhat muddled (but really isn’t that hard to discern)…

But to these, and others, I confidently reply: so what? Personally, after waiting 3 years for another “Spider-Man” movie, I wasn’t disappointed. I didn’t look at my watch until 2 hrs into the film, which is pretty good. I was able to follow the storyline(s) pretty easily, and didn’t feel like much more was needed for each…except for Venom, of course… The action sequences were still top notch, and the acting was just as good as the previous movies. There were even more comedic breaks throughout that had the entire theater laughing. For those of us wanting to see Spider-Man swing across the big screen again, you won’t be disappointed.

Now, don’t get me wrong…the movie wasn’t perfect… Sam Raimi (the director) said recently that the entire “Venom” story line should have been broken up into two films: get with the black, alien, costume…get rid of it after you find out it’s evil…give it to Eddie Brock…then have another movie where you deal with the new enemy (i.e. Venom). Raimi was “strongly encouraged” to include Venom in this film by the movie studio, and it shows – more could have been done with Venom as a character, with lots more development. He’s really only in there in that final fight sequence as an afterthought, but at least the sequence was relatively bad-ass… The entire Sand Man character was set up and he did his thing, but he wasn’t terribly necessary… And the New Goblin was a necessary evil, I think, to tie up that thread that started way back in the first movie. Really, I would have just done away with Sand Man and stuck completely with Venom…yet then again, it may have been best to have Sand Man in this one and develop Venom, but not actually fight him until the fourth movie… Either way, something different probably should have been done between those two villains, yet they were still fun to see…

So yeah, in the end, I thought it was pretty good. As good as the previous two? Probably not…but certainly not as bad as some reviewers make it out to be. If you liked the previous ones, or you’re a fan of the comics, you’ll enjoy seeing Peter’s turn to the “dark side” with the black costume, as many of us have waited for since the beginning… And in the end, the movie isn’t left hanging for a fourth, yet there are enough “open doors” available to make it worth doing. Then again, if Raimi will just get messed with again, do we really want another one done?

Just look at the Batman franchise (pre-“Batman Begins“)…